Hat tip: Julian B
A day after Mohamed Geele was found guilty of attempted murder and terrorism for a New Year's Day axe attack, judge Ingrid Thorsboe disregarded his plea to be spared expulsion back to war-torn Somalia after his time behind bars.
"Mohamed Geele is sentenced to nine years in prison and expulsion from Denmark for life," after he completes his sentence, Thorsboe told the court in the central Danish city of Aarhus said.
Geele's legal team immediately announced that they would appeal.
A jury at the district court had convicted Geele, 29, on Thursday at the end of a trial which had gripped Denmark.
During the trial, the cartoonist Kurt Westergaard recounted how he feared he was going to die after Geele broke into his home, and was only able to survive by locking himself inside a special panic room from where he alerted police.
The prosecution had requested Geele serve 12 years in prison before being deported and banned from ever returning to Denmark, but on Friday lead prosecutor Kirsten Dyrman said she was "satisfied with the verdict".
"That he received three years less in prison than I asked for was due to the fact that Kurt Westergaard was not physically harmed in the attack," she said.
Geele's lawyer Niels Strauss, who had asked that his client receive no more than six years in prison and not be expelled, meanwhile immediately appealed the verdict and sentence.
He demanded "the acquittal of (his) client for charges of terrorism, and that extenuating circumstances (be considered) for the other charges".
Strauss maintained that an attack against a single person could not be qualified as terrorism, while Geele, a father of four, told the court his life would be in danger if he were deported to Somalia.
The Somali broke into 75-year-old Westergaard's home last year wielding an axe and screaming, "You must die! You are going to Hell!", according to the cartoonist's testimony in court last month.
Westergaard said he escaped "certain death" by rushing into a bathroom-turned-panic-room to call police.
When officers arrived, Geele, who is suspected of having links to the Somali Islamist movement Al-Shebab, came out wielding his axe and a knife. He was shot twice and placed under arrest.
In court, Geele said repeatedly he was only trying to frighten the cartoonist to get him to stop "dirtying" the prophet.
Questioned by AFP, Strauss said his client "was not surprised by the verdict in light of the heavy charges against him".
Although the sentence was not as harsh as what the prosecutor had requested, it "shows in my opinion that use of the anti-terrorism law is dubious and vague, allowing very broad interpretations," he said.
He went on to criticise the fact that the court's three judges and six jury members based their decision on legislation "adopted in all haste in 2002 ... after the September 9, 2011 attacks in the United States".
Judge Thorsboe said the court had ruled Geele should also "pay damages amounting to 10, 000 Danish kroner (1, 830 dollars, 1, 340 euros) to Kurt Westergaard, as well as cover the costs of the trial," and that he would "remain in preventive custody until his appeals case".
Aarhus is home to the Jyllands-Posten daily that in 2005 first published Westergaard's and other artists' controversial cartoons of the Muslim prophet.
Westergaard has faced numerous death threats since the publication of his drawing, the most controversial of the 12 cartoons of Mohammed which appeared in the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten on September 30, 2005.
The cartoon depicted the prophet wearing a turban shaped like a bomb with a lit fuse.
The drawings sparked deadly protests across the Islamic world in early 2006.
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